Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSD’s) account for 70% of all Work Cover long Term Claims and more than 62% of all work cover costs.

Manual Handling injuries in many cases can be directly linked to Employee Well Being, meaning that “How we feel in the work place“ may have a major role to play on how safe we feel in the same work situation.

Therefore providing training in manual handling, whilst we applaud the efforts of any employer to provide this, the training may only go part of the way to addressing the real sources of many manual handling injuries.

In reality employers need to manage the entire work place and that means not just focussing on the obvious physical hazards but also the conditions and atmosphere in the work place as well.

Raising the employees sense of responsibility for self and for the others in the workplace and seeing the management of OH&S as being a shared activity will greatly reduce the incidents of “out of body”- “Inadvertent experiences” which we have as workers, this in turn will reduce what seem to be manual handling injuries.

Equipping an Employee with the correct knowledge of manual handling techniques in their industry is also vital and this knowledge will serve to offset some of the unsafe actions and decisions which many workers take when in stressful circumstances at the work place.